


a very long fall

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, Post-Episode: s01e06 FZZT, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 10:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10555152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Early Wednesday morning, a very attractive man jumps out of a plane to save Jemma from certain death.





	

Early Wednesday morning, a very attractive man jumps out of a plane to save Jemma from certain death.

Only a few hours later, as she finds herself wrapped up in the love and affection of their friends, she discovers that none of it can quite warm her when the price is his departure, temporary though it may be.

She’s developed a crush. Natural. Reasonable. All-together terrible.

It changes nothing. They are still teammates, still coworkers, still each responsible in their own ways for protecting one another’s lives. The shift in her feelings changes none of that.

(It changes everything.)

.

+

.

On Saturday, he catches her again.

The Bus remains grounded for six painstaking hours, at the end of which she can only say there’s no sign anything’s wrong with her at all. Why she fainted in the middle of the lounge, she has no idea, but it is certainly not related to the Chitauri virus that nearly took her life.

Coulson reluctantly orders them back into the air, but it doesn’t escape her notice that he chooses a robbery in the next state over rather than the much more interesting UFO sighting an ocean away for their next mission.

It’s just as well, since her self-diagnosis is not entirely correct.

.

+

.

The following week, Ward loses consciousness while chasing down a kidnapper.

“He wasn’t making any sense,” Skye reports. She hovers at the edges of the lab, fretting alongside Fitz while Jemma searches for some sign of what’s wrong. Jemma doesn’t require her report on what happened, she has the recording from the mission as well as her own memory of the way Ward’s speech began to slur before he dropped.

Thirty minutes after May and Coulson dragged Ward into the lab, he sits up. He speaks perfectly normally, shows no signs of being ill whatsoever, and only cares for getting back out there to track down the man he lost.

The mission proceeds, albeit much more cautiously. The kidnappers are apprehended, the victim rescued, and none of the team suffer any further mishaps. It seems to have been a fluke.

.

+

.

Things might have carried on in just that way for weeks or even months if it weren’t for the horrible South Ossetia mission Hand sent Ward and Fitz on.

It’s Fitz’s first real op, so Jemma is relieved when Ward waves off her order to wait for his own check-up until Fitz’s is finished. Her reasoning in taking Fitz first was that he would be less accustomed to any pain and also quicker to see to. But Ward says he’ll let the Hub’s doctors take a look once the Overkill device is delivered, allowing Jemma to fuss at her leisure and Fitz plenty of time to regale Jemma and May, who joins them after the Bus is parked, with stories of the mission.

He’s just in the middle of explaining that Ward was the mysterious third man who knocked the other two unconscious when Jemma has the sudden, overwhelming realization she has no idea what the object she’s holding in her hand is called. The floor rises up to meet her rather rapidly after that, so she doesn’t have long to worry over it.

.

+

.

Gauze. She was holding a square of gauze and using it to clean the blood away from Fitz’s more minor scrapes. She’s not anymore however, as she’s lying beneath the bright lights she instantly recognizes as belonging to a SHIELD medical lab.

A voice is speaking very nearby and a hand is holding hers atop the blankets. It’s odd though - the hand, not the voice, which is quite soothing. There’s something wrapped tightly around her wrist and, when she looks, it’s holding the other wrist as well, clasping them together in a way that both makes it easier for them to hold hands and harder to stop.

The voice quiets, pulling her attention to the face that comes with the hand. Ward.

“It’s okay,” he says as her heart pounds. It really isn’t.

(She hopes she isn’t blushing too terribly.)

.

+

.

They’re damaged. Both of them.

It’s just dumb luck Ward was having his brain scanned when his neural pathways began to abruptly degrade. Then Jemma was rushed in and the stories of their previous fainting fits came out and … It was all quite fast after that, Jemma’s told.

Something’s gone wrong in their neural chemistry as a result of exposure to the virus or the antiserum or both. There might be a way of curing them or at the very least temporarily setting off the effects, but at the moment their best recourse is each other.

“When you touch,” Dr. Streiten says, “your bodies are able to use one another to even things out, so to speak.” The simplified explanation is for Jemma’s hovering teammates. Presumably he realizes she’d like a more detailed one and silently passes her his tablet while Ward speaks. (Ward’s hand moves against hers while he does so, it’s enough she can’t even focus on more than the word _cerebellum_ for a moment.)

“How often?” he asks. “I mean, do we have to touch? And how long?”

Engrossed as she is, Jemma doesn’t see Dr. Streiten shrug. She doesn’t have to. It’s plain as day in his notes: he doesn’t know.

.

+

.

Three weeks. They spend three weeks in the Hub, undergoing tests and being observed. In that time, the world cracks open like an egg; a particle accelerator goes critical in Utah, resulting in a new Gifted being Indexed and, rumor has it, transferred to the Fridge after her mental breakdown; and a paganist hate group spreads terror across eastern Europe. All of this Jemma and Grant hear about through the team’s frequent visits and their own access to outside news reports. All, save for the last.

Agent Ferdinand Dry spends one solitary night in the quarantine unit beside theirs before whatever illness he contracted while fighting the paganists takes his life. (Technically, it’s Agent Triplett, who came with Ward’s SO when news of their confinement spread, who takes Dry’s life. If he hadn’t, it would have been Ward. She saw it in his eyes while he watched Dry stalk about his cell. Ward would have done it, if Dry had gotten near enough to truly threaten her, or died trying.)

Ward holds her while a team cleans up Dry’s remains. She falls asleep against his chest, still shaking, with the image of Dry’s skull opening up trapped behind her eyelids.

The quarantine cannot end soon enough.

.

+

.

Life goes back to normal after that. In large part, she thinks, due to Coulson.

Until they can find a way to be apart for more than seventy-two hours, Ward is effectively benched from specialist work. Unless that work is part of a team rather than the long-term assignments he used to take part in. And if Ward is going to be returning to the field, Jemma must as well, simple as that.

.

+

.

It’s not simple.

It’s not normal.

Ward touches her. Frequently.

It’s all innocent enough. He steals the spot on the sofa next to her on game nights and, when he can’t, holds her hand. (He even holds her hand sometimes when he is sitting hip-to-hip with her.) He touches her back while they walk and touches her arm or shoulder during missions. His foot taps her leg while she checks him over after missions.

She hates it.

She loves it.

She hates it _because_ she loves it. Ward must think she has some sort of condition (aside from the obvious, of course) because every time his skin touches hers, her heart gives a pathetic leap of joy.

It is possible she doesn’t work quite as hard as she ought on finding a less intrusive means of keeping them both alive.

.

+

.

They start sleeping together while Coulson is missing.

It begins while he’s sleeping off the effects of the anesthetic she administered in order to remove the bullet from his shoulder. It’s as good a time as any to get in a little prolonged contact - who knows how long he might be required to be away once their replacement ( _temporary_ replacement) CO arrives? - and she must be in need of sleep because the last thing she remembers is thinking she’ll just rest her head on the edge of the table for a moment and the next, Hand is asking if she’s interrupting anything.

It takes days to find Coulson and the brief sleep they both got is hardly enough. They take cat naps together on the couch while Hand has her people work around them. A brief hour curled into his side here. A quick twenty minutes with his head in her lap there.

And then Coulson is back and somehow, in a way that seems completely natural, Ward pulls her into his hotel room. There’s some excuse - something about checking his stitches or perhaps it was that she would be on hand to check them if he turned wrong in the night - whichever the case, she ends up in his bed. She sleeps with his arms wrapped around her, the gentle cadence of his breath easing her down to sleep.

And it is only that: sleep.

It’s lovely.

They continue sharing.

.

+

.

There is a shift in their interactions outside bed. If she’d been asked to guess beforehand what it might be, she would suppose Ward would stop his casual touches now that their nights spent in one another’s arms satisfy their biological need for contact.

He doesn’t. Stop, that is.

He smiles more. He is kinder to her - not that he was _un_ kind before, but there is a softness to his treatment of her now that wasn’t previously present. There’s a- a gentleness. And an intentness to him whenever she speaks, as though he considers her valuable in a way he did not before.

Perhaps he’s simply feeling guilty for shoving his way into her bed and shows it by going out of his way to be kind to her.

It doesn’t matter why. Her crush deepens into what she fears might be real love.

.

+

.

Ward is an excellent bedmate. He holds her through her nightmares and never allows her dreams of falling to see her tumbling out of bed, even though they’re rather cramped in the narrow Bus quarters. She spends her nights with one of his arms curled around her back, his hand clutching her waist or her hip, and her head resting over his ribs.

He’s even more prone to nightmares than she is - she can’t imagine anyone in his line of work wouldn’t be - but he never tosses or turns. She only knows when he’s having one because his pulse quickens and his breathing grows shallow.

She finds that if she laces their fingers and cranes her neck to whisper his given name in his ear, he’ll calm down and curl more tightly around her as he does so.

She falls further.

.

+

.

She cries herself to sleep in his arms the night Seth Dormer dies.

.

+

.

He kisses her.

They’re awake, both too keyed up still from the mission to save Skye’s life and her half-afraid if she sleeps Skye will take a turn. Fitz is downstairs, watching over her, and Jemma’s phone is propped up on the coffee table, showing her the steady pulse of Skye’s heart. Ward’s is beating away beneath her chin while she lays on his chest, pretending she might sleep again this year.

His hands are on her back, fingertips trailing patterns, and he stops in the middle of saying something- something she wasn’t listening to, she’s sorry to say once she realizes he’s fallen silent. But he’s looking at her in a way that’s grown familiar in recent weeks, and all of a sudden his hands move - to steady her hips, she’ll realize later - and his head comes up and he’s kissing her.

It doesn’t last long as it must be hurting him to arch his back that way, but it’s long enough to set her every nerve to vibrating. She hides her blush in her folded hands.

“Well?” he asks after a hundred beats of Skye’s heart. She’s rather impressed he held out that long.

She pulls herself forward, eliciting a hiss she knows isn’t from pain, and presses a chain of kisses from his mouth to his ear. Then she lays her head on his shoulder and watches Skye’s pulse. After a few seconds, he resumes drawing patterns on her back, this time beneath her sweater.

.

+

.

She’s fallen. Irrevocably.

But she has two strong, steady arms which she knows from experience will catch her every time.

She’s never needed more.

 


End file.
